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DEBATE
The Problem with Democracy
†
Matthew Flinders1,2,*
1
Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics, Department of Politics, University of Sheffield,
Sheffield, UK;
2
Sir Walter Murdoch School of Public Policy and International Affairs, Murdoch University, Murdoch, Western Australia,
Australia
*
Correspondence: m.flinders@sheffield.ac.uk
There can be little doubt that of all the great ‘enduring ideas’ there can be few
so central to modern life around the world as ‘democracy’. Indeed, an ongoing
academic monitoring project has so far catalogued over 500 variants, forms or
sub-species of this model of social organisation. It is therefore both a concept
with adjectives and also a concept with something of an image problem and this
is reflecting in a vast literature that revolves around the perceived growth of ‘disaf-
fected democrats’. So what is the problem with democracy? This article responds by
identifying not one but seven ‘problems’ with democracy which, when woven
together, reveal a withering away of our capacity to re-imagine a different way of
living; to re-connect with those around us; to re-interpret challenges as opportun-
ities or to re-define how we understand and make democracy work.
Keywords: Denial, Democracy, Expectations, Listening, Markets, Populism
In 1949 the American philosopher Sidney Hook remarked that ‘the most curious
phenomena of our time’ was the manner in which totalitarian regimes sought to
wrap themselves in the language of democracy (p. 582). Hook’s focus on the demo-
cratically dubious ‘holiday rhetoric’ of certain countries was later developed
at more length by Bernard Crick (1962, p. 12) when he noted, ‘Democracy is
perhaps the most promiscuous word in the world of public affairs ...She is every-
body’s mistress and yet somehow retains her magic even when a lover sees that her
favours are being, in his light illicitly shared by many others’. ‘Indeed, even amid our
pain at being denied her exclusive fidelity’ Crick went on ‘we are proud of her adapt-
ability to all sorts of circumstances, to all sorts of company’. 50 years later it is
†
This article was originally delivered as a public lecture at the British Library in London as part of their
‘Enduring Ideas’ series. It was written while the author was an Open Society Fellow at the School of
Governance at Utrecht University.
#The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Hansard Society; all rights reserved. For per-
missions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
Parliamentary Affairs (2016) 69, 181–203 doi:10.1093/pa/gsv008
Advance Access Publication 21 April 2015
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possible to question whether democracy ‘retains her magic’ and to suggest that the
concept’s malleability—its ‘adaptability to all sorts of circumstances’—may have
been exhausted. Indeed, just the titles of recent books on the topic—Disaffected
Democracies, Political Disaffection in Contemporary Democracies, Hatred of Democ-
racy, Why We Hate Politics, Democratic Deficit, Don’t Vote for the Bastards! It Just
Encourages Them, Vanishing Voters, The Confidence Trap, Ruling the Void, The
End of Politics, Democracy in Retreat, Democracy in Crisis?, Democracies in Flux, Un-
controllable Societies and Disaffected Individuals, Is Democracy a Lost Cause? and
‘Can Democracy be Saved? (for a review of this body of literature, see Ercan and
Gagnon, 2014)—paint a worrying picture of democratic decline and the rise of
anti-politics.
And yet, there can be little doubt that of all the great ‘enduring ideas’—to put this
article squarely within the contours of the British Library’s new lecture series where
it was first presented—there can be few so central to modern life as ‘democracy’. The
twist or the hook at this point is that public opinion surveys consistently reflect high
public support and attachment to the concept of ‘democracy’. Whatever it is the
public like it. At the same time similar surveys reveal worrying low and falling
levels of support for the concept of ‘politics’. Whatever that is the public don’t
like it. Maybe the problem with democracy—at a deeper level—is that you
cannot have democracy without the politics. The aim of this article is to explore
this ‘democracy–politics paradox’ (Stoker and Evans, 2014). What has gone
wrong in the relationship between the governors and the governed? Why has elect-
oral turnout declined, public trust fallen and membership of traditional political
parties nosedived (note the adjective ‘traditional’). What is the problem with dem-
ocracy? The problem with even talking about ‘the problem’ with democracy is that it
is a loaded statement. Loaded in the sense that it suggests that
(1) If there is a single ‘problem’ then it might be argued that a discussion of
‘the problems’ [plural] with democracy might offer a more rounded and
sophisticated set of answers; and
(2) loaded in the sense that it accepts that ‘a problem’ exists.
From an academic perspective the problem is that the literature on this topic is, as
John-Paul Gagnon (2013) has convincingly argued, vast but the shared intellectual
reference points are sparse. However, in this article I want to slice right through this
seam of scholarship in order to make one bold and simple argument: that is, if there
is a problem with democracy it relates to a loss of what we might call our democratic
or political imagination. By this I mean our capacity to re-imagine a different way of
living; to re-connect with those around us; to re-interpret challenges as opportun-
ities or to re-define how we understand and make democracy work. The problem
with democracy, to put the previous point slightly differently, is that we have lost
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our political imagination (and to some extent our collective self-confidence) and I
want to understand why.
I don’t have the answer but my aim in making this argument about the political
imagination is more concerned with provoking a debate and putting down some
markers within which that debate can exist. My role is therefore to try and make
the reader think a little differently, to provoke you about that perennial challenge
we call the problem with democracy. If I succeed in creating some space for the pol-
itical imagination then I will have achieved my aim. In doing so I want to highlight
seven (inter-related) ‘problems with democracy’:
Problem 1. Voting alone (the civic culture has changed)
Problem 2. Populism unleashed (there are no quick fixes)
Problem 3. Market madness (all about the price not the value)
Problem 4. Democratic denial (the coping mechanism)
Problem 5. Hyper-democracy (the deafening sound of ‘voice’)
Problem 6. Hearing loss (listening to democracy)
Problem 7. Political illiteracy (learning to engage)
To highlight these problems—please note, I have avoided any reference to
‘deadly sins’—is not to deny the huge achievements or benefits of ‘mere politics’.
It cannot ‘make all sad hearts glad’ (to paraphrase Bernard Crick) but it delivers
far more than many ‘disaffected democrats’ seem to understand. Our political
imagination—collectively and individually—seems tainted with dominant
beliefs about a dirty, grubby and generally detached political sphere. This negativity
may well explain rising levels of electoral inequality and a rapidly growing ‘demo-
cratic gap’ between the poor and the young, on the one hand, and the wealthy or
older people, on the other. This focus on the ‘democratic gap’ provides a link to
my first problem and the changing civic culture.
1. Problem 1. Voting alone (the civic culture has changed)
The first problem—or maybe we should say ‘challenge’—w ith democracy is that the
political culture of the demos has changed but the traditional institutions and pro-
cesses of democratic politics have arguably failed to adapt in ways that acknowledge
or respond. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba’s seminal The Civic Culture (1963)
suggested that democracy depended on a delicate balance between ‘participant citi-
zens’ (disposed to have a healthy distrust of the authorities) and ‘subject citizens’,
who were cognitively competent but inclined to be deferential. This culture was
itself dependent upon having a basic awareness of the institutions and processes
of politics and popular support for the system as a whole (it was an ‘allegiant pol-
itical culture’ where diffuse support was necessary). Limited trust in government
and the lack of a democratic political culture was therefore seen as holding back
The Problem with Democracy 183
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less developed nations. Robert Putman’s et al. (1993) work on Italian regions
emphasised the open, trusting norms of Northern Italy (and its better functioning
governments) in comparison with the politically alienated culture of Mezzogiorno
in the south. In the 1990s a great deal of the literature on Eastern Europe (e.g.
Klingermann et al., 2006) focused on the development of a supportive political
culture amongst the public. This has also been a long-running theme of studies
of democratisation in East Asia, South America and Africa (e.g. Dalton and Shin,
2006;Chu et al., 2008).
The simple fact this ‘problem’ focuses on is that the civic culture of advanced
liberal democracies appears to have changed in ways that suggest the erosion of
popular support and the emergence of less deferential ‘critical citizens’. Increased
public skepticism and the emergence of protest politics was documented at
length in the Trilateral Commission’s The Crisis of Democracy (1975). A combin-
ation of social modernisation and globalisation seemed to have created a new
type of citizen and a different civic culture in post-industrial democracies. This
shift was captured in the work of Ronald Inglehart (1977) on post-materialism
and was reflected in new forms of direct, assertive and issue-specific political en-
gagement that has eroded trust in traditional institutions. The World Values
Survey, for example, reveals that trust in parliaments has generally declined in
12 of the 15 established democracies for which long-term data are available
(see Pharr and Putnam, 2002;Dalton, 2004). The civic culture has therefore
become not only more suspicious of political processes and political institutions
but also more individualised in its internal logic. This is something we’ll return
to when we discuss the problem of ‘Amazonian politics’ but for now I want to
emphasise that a link exists between the civic culture and the broader fabric of
society. Changes to the latter have affected the former and the concept of ‘liquid
modernity’ can help us understand this link. This is, of course, an idea developed
by Zygman Bauman (2000,2005,2006a,b) but it captures the erosion, hollowing-
out or ebbing-away of those once solid social reference points that allowed people to
make sense of the world and their place within it. From the role of religion to the
notion of a job for life, to the existence of tight local communities to the emergence
of ‘the precariat’ (Standing, 2011) whose job and position in life is inherently
precarious due the demands of the market for flexibility and mobility.
This focus on ‘liquidity’ provides a link back to Putnam’s work on social capital
and its erosion and forward to Mills (1959) and his work on ‘the trap’ and ‘the
promise’ of the social sciences but my aim is simply to highlight that the dominant
political culture is no longer one in which individuals either trust or join political
institutions. This is not to say that the public ‘hates politics’ or does not engage in
political activities—quite the opposite—but the nature of the engagement
has become more focused, transient and often works through non-traditional
channels.
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As the IPPR’s (2013) research on ‘divided democracy’ reveals, there is also an
increasing polarisation within ‘the public’ when it comes to political engagement,
in general, and electoral turnout, in particular. Put very simply, if you are young or
poor you are far less likely to vote than if you are older or wealthy. In 2010
just 44 per cent of 18–24 year olds voted in the General Election, compared to
76 per cent of those aged 65 and over (the gap was only 18 per cent in 1970 compared
to 32 per cent in 2010). At the moment just 10 per centof those aged 18– 25 state that
they are certain to vote in the 2015 General Election and in the USA the ratio of
young to old voting is likely to be 1:4 by 2020. This ‘gap’ matters for at least three
reasons: first, there is increasing evidence of a ‘cohort effect’ in which young
people do not take the participatory habit into later life; second, there is an under-
standable ‘policy effect’ in the sense that politicians tend to cater their policies to
benefit those members of the public that are most like to vote (i.e. the older and
wealthier) thereby creating a spiral of cynicism on the part of the young and the
poor, therefore further depressing turnout. Finally, there is an issue about roots
and meaning and citizenship and notably about political recruitment as those
from the most deprived and disengaged communities feel little commitment to
broader society, let alone any aspiration to ‘step into the arena’ themselves. This
could itself flow into a discussion of social anomie or to the data on ‘Generation
X’ and ‘Generation Y’ but for now we just need to acknowledge Gerry Stoker’s
and Evans’ (2014) conclusion that ‘the civic world described by Almond and
Verba has gone’. Levels of political literacy and political trust seem to have fallen
among large sections of society and the civic culture seems to have become
almost ‘anti-political’ or ‘post-political. This leads us to our second ‘problem’
and the manner in which apathy and distrust has created a fertile public terrain
for those who wish to nurture and benefit from the politics of pessimism.
2. Problem 2. Populism unleashed (there are no quick fixes)
‘The spectre of populism haunts modern democracies’, Bernard Crick wrote in 2005
(p. 625) and I want to suggest that this spectre is currently gorging at the feast of
anti-politics in a way that needs to be understood and rejected. The populists are
impatient of procedures and unwilling to accept the simple fact that democratic
politics tends to be slow, messy and cumbersome—as well as prone to producing
sub-optimal decisions—for the simple fact that politics is about squeezing collect-
ive decisions out of competing demands. Populists may well be impatient of such
procedures. But when these intermediary processes and institutions are denounced
en masse the dangers to liberty and to democracy are significant because in many
ways populism creates enemies and denies the need to compromise. Put slightly dif-
ferently, populism seeks to delegitimise mainstream democracy. Politics is complex
but populism is simple: ‘if we could just get rid of the self-interested meddling
The Problem with Democracy 185
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politicians everything would be fine’. This is a critical point. Populism tends to
create simplistic interpretations of problems and then simplistic solutions,
whereas meaningful responses will have to acknowledge complexity and the
simple fact that there are no simple solutions to complex problems.
And yet, as Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser (2013) have argued,
populism is both a threat and a corrective to democracy. Populism is, as
Anthony Painter (2014) has argued, a ‘challenger brand’ within democracy in the
sense that it seeks to change the way democracy functions. It is expressive, direct
and emotive and it signals growing public disenchantment with democratic polit-
ics. Or as Mudde and Kaltwasser (2013, p. 8) define it,
A thin centred ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated
into two homogenous and antagonistic groups, the ‘pure people’ and the
‘corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of
the Volonte
´ge
´ne
´rale (general will) of the people.
Paul Taggart (2000) emphasises the importance of the notion of ‘heartland’ to
populist politics, which is essentially an idealised notion of a morally pure group
of people that should have a greater capacity for direct action without being fru-
strated by the checks and balances of liberal democracy. Groups beyond this heart-
land are rapidly stereotyped, demonised and the need to compromise is rejected in
favour of strong leadership. So whereas populists make a virtue out of simplicity—
the answer is immigration control, the answer is economic protection, the answer is
clamping down on minority rights, the answer is taking back control from multi-
national unions or international organisations, etc.,—the mainstream parties
acknowledge (and indeed have to work through) complexity.
But the emergence of populist parties across Western Europe highlights at least
three central issues. The first takes us back to the civic culture and the worrying low
levels of political literacy—by which I mean a simple understanding of how politics
works and what politicians do—amongst the public. Populism’s grip on the public’s
imagination might not be so tight if the public understood the inevitable tensions
and dilemmas that politicians face and that cannot simply be wished away. Second,
populism is arguably tied to a belief that it is possible to take the politics out of dem-
ocracy, therebysweeping away the need for compromises and the constraints of pol-
itics. But as Mike Kenny and Nick Pearce (2014, p. 7) have noted, it also ‘reflects the
publics desire for a strong transformational leader’ but within a broader social
context in which politicians are themselves viewed with increasing contempt.
This ‘leadership trap’ is one we will come back to but the final issue here takes us
back to issues of liquidity and change. In many ways the populist parties are legit-
imate and they can re-define, re-imagine and re-invigorate politics by being a ‘chal-
lenger brand’ and they are also a reference point through which to view the failure of
established institutions to evolve alongside society.
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Populist parties often fill the gap that emerges between the governors and
the governed and in this sense Douglas Carswell’s intervention (London Evening
Standard,3Nov.2014) on ‘Kodak parties’ in an era of digital democracy is exactly
right. The Kodak brand was once synonymous with cameras and from the
moment George Eastmanlaunched the first Kodak camera in 1888 Kodak had a dom-
inant market share. By the 1970s more than 90 per cent of camera film products sold
in the USA were made by Kodak to the extent that people even spoke of taking family
photographs as capturing that ‘Kodak moment’. Then came digital cameras and in
2012 Kodak filed for bankruptcy. I wonder when our political parties will file for
bankruptcy or if they will limp on as hollowed-out versions of once great collective
institutions? Some critics might argue that we also have a Kodak Parliament, a
Kodak constitution and a Kodak political system! The iteration of the problem
with democracy is construed as the failure of the institutions and processes of demo-
cratic politics to keep pace with both society and the structure of the modernstate. A
nice thesis but on its own possibly too simple. It’s populists not academics that like to
simplify complex problems but I can’t help but wonder if the problem with democ-
racy—and particularly changes in the civic culture—do not stem from the fact that
for at least three decades all of the main political parties have themselves generally
offered a simple solution to all social problems—the market.
3. Problem 3. Market madness (Amazonian politics and the loss
of equilibrium)
‘When too great a gap opens between hallowed democracy and the grubby business
of politics’, Margaret Canovan (1999 p. 12) wrote, ‘populists tend to move onto the
vacant territory, promising instead of the dirty world of party maneuvering the
shiny ideal of democracy renewed’. But interestingly she also notes how populism
can be stirred by the failure of political parties and politicians to consider ordinary
opinion, or to offer any real choices or vision or moral purpose. I can’t help but
think there is a link here with the ‘endism’ literature—The End of Politics (Carl
Boggs), The End of History (Francis Fukayama), etc.—and the ‘post-ism’ litera-
ture—Post-Democracy (Colin Crouch), Post-Political (Erik Swyngedouw), etc.—
and the dominance of the market. As Bernard Crick’s In Defence of Politics (1962)
underlined one of the central roles of democratic politics was to act as a counter-
weight to the market but is it possible that any sense of balance has been lost.
Indeed, there are few areas of social life where democratic control over the
market has not been relinquished in a manner that appears in conflict with demo-
cratic theory’s normative assertion that those affected by a decision should have an
equal opportunity to affect that decision. Whether a healthy equilibrium has ever
been achieved is questionable but powers have clearly shifted to international cor-
porate centres beyond the nation state.
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Market madness has prevailed and a hegemonic neo-liberal political rationality
has won through from health to housing and from prisons to schools. More specif-
ically, practices of governance, the social system of production, dominant notions
of ‘value’ and collective understandings of citizenship have been altered in such a
way that each of these spheres is construed in market terms. There are many
better qualified than me to explore and critique the transformation of market cap-
italism but I want to focus on two issues at the macro and micro ends of the con-
tinuum. At the macro-historical institutional end of things I want to highlight
the work of Wolfgang Streek (2013) and his arguments about how the transform-
ation of the global economic order since the late 1960s has eviscerated traditional
liberal democracy and how this has undermined the civic culture. The emergence
of increasing data on increasing inequalities in terms of income and wealth, com-
bined with books such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century
(2013), highlight structural features of capitalism that dovetail with anti-capitalist
groups, such as the Occupy Movement. In a world of increasing austerity measures
for the masses but increasing wealth for a small minority, democratic politics under-
standably comes under increasing pressure.
But there is also a more subtle and less discussed element of the market domin-
ance that I want to bring to the fore. It’s not just the transformation of market cap-
italism that has occurred but the transition by stealth towards a more individualised
system of market democracy. I call this the rise of ‘Amazonian politics’. This has little
to do with South American jungles and more to do with the emergence of a civic
culture that is both individualised and market-based. In this sense individuals
view their interactions with parties and political candidates as they would a retail
relationship in which goods and services are bought. The citizen-consumer
makes their choice, spends their vote and then waits for the goods to be delivered
(gift wrapped and within 24 hours) as if they were a CD or book purchased on
Amazon. But of course democratic politics was never intended to satisfy a world
of individualised wants and when compared to simplistic market assumptions it
will generally fail because it is geared to collective outputs. Gerry Stoker (2006,
p. 68), for example, argues that ‘many citizens fail fully to appreciate that politics
in the end involves the collective imposition of decisions’, and that ‘this problem
has been compounded by the spread of market-based consumerism and ...indi-
vidualism’. I was in The Netherlands recently and a man challenged my broader
defence of politics by complaining that he had voted for a politician that promised
to get rid of all the windmills but when in government the politician had broken his
promise and had saved the windmills. In the man’s eyes this was incontrovertible
evidence that politics was failing and that all politicians were scoundrels when in
fact it represented the need to compromise and negotiate in an increasingly super-
diverse society. I always thought that the Dutch liked windmills ...but the simple
point is that I do think a problem with democracy is the emergence of a thin model
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of market democracy in which the public behave (and are treated) as customers
rather than citizens. This concern dovetails with the more extreme interpretations
of the ‘post-democratic market state’ by scholars such as Adrian Pabst (2010) which
brings me to our fourth problem with democracy and a focus on denial.
4. Problem 4. Democratic denial (the coping mechanism)
So how can I make the link between ‘market democracy’ and ‘democratic denial’?
The bridge or link I want to use is Joseph Schumpeter’s (1942) notion of ‘creative
destruction’. This was the ‘process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutio-
nises the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, inces-
santly creating a new one’. And yet there appears to be an inverse correlation
between the ‘creative destruction’ of markets as opposed to democratic structures.
This is a critical point that takes us back to the issues of liquidity and new social
flows in terms of migration, religion, professional mobility, etc. It could be
argued that the creativity that has been shown in the market place has rarely
been matched by equal and opposing creativity in the democratic sphere. Put slight-
ly differently, our institutions and processes of democracy seem to evolve and
change at a glacial pace while the world around it seems to move at an ever-
increasing pace. Is it any wonder that people seem disconnected? There is,
however, a deeper malady at play that connects with the theme of ‘creative destruc-
tion’ while also linking to the themes of leadership and the role of the market. In
many ways the ‘creative destruction’ of the demos has taken the form of the
hollowing-out of the demos. The narrowing of the democratic sphere in terms of
scope and values as a process of ‘de-democratisation’ (Wendy Brown, 2006), ‘col-
ossal banality’ (Carl Boggs, 2001) or ‘banalisation’ (Philippe Maarek, 2011) occurs
in which democratic choices are either reduced down to questions of technocratic
rationality or market efficiency or are transferred to allegedly non-political arenas in
which judges or experts will take decisions instead of politicians. I have written
about this process of depoliticisation elsewhere (Flinders 2012;Wood and Flinders,
2014) and I do not wish to go over old terrain this evening apart from making three
simple points.
The first is an issue regarding the complexity of governing and the expectations
of the public. In a sense both of these elements are increasing: governing is becom-
ing more complex (politics a more challenging profession) and the public’s expec-
tations are increasing while the cognitive and institutional capacity of politicians
remains limited (or in some cases is reducing). When faced with unrealistic expec-
tations in a low-trust high-blame adversarial context politicians might be viewed as
quite rational in terms of delegating responsibility—and therefore to some extent
blame—to an arm’s-length body. The creation of NHS England is an example that
deserves brief comment. It is established on the basis of the need to depoliticise the
The Problem with Democracy 189
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health service and yet at one stroke this new body with a budget of £100 billion
creates far-reaching questions about the role and need for (six) ministers in the
Department for Health. Protestations of the need for ‘evidence-based policy’ and
the transfer of powers away from ministers may well form an increasingly import-
ant coping mechanism for the pressures of office but (and secondly) there is a clear
paradox here in the sense that public confidence in politicians and democratic
denial make uncomfortable bed-fellows. Put slightly differently, democratic
denial is likely to sap the enthusiasm of even the most committed citizen. The ‘pol-
itics of denial’ also introduces a new dimension to ‘the leadership trap’ that Mike
Kenny and Nick Pearce noted (above) in the sense that it is certainly true that the
public seem to want ‘strong leaders’ while at the very same time not trusting poli-
ticians and wanting them to be ‘normal’, ‘sensitive’, etc. But there is a second dimen-
sion in the sense that political leaders are increasingly ‘ruling the void’—to use Peter
Mair’s term— in the sense that once in office they realise that their capacity for
action has been severely circumscribed by the decisions of their predecessors.
This is reflected in political complaints about the existence of ‘rubber levers’ but
might actually display the cumulative impact of a general decline in collective con-
fidence amongst the political elite.
And yet how can this thesis about ‘problems’ and ‘anti-politics’ stand-up to
those who argue that we are, in fact, experiencing a period of ‘democratic reinvig-
oration’ the likes of which has never been seen before. Take, for example, the work of
John Keane and his book The Life and Death of Democracy (2009) in which he high-
lights the contemporary emergence of a ‘monitory democracy’ that recognises the
rapid proliferation and increased role of extra-parliamentary and generally
non-elected ‘power-scrutinising and power-monitoring mechanisms’ (regulatory
bodies, auditors, courts, electoral commissions, protection agencies, complaints
boards, rights of appeal and review, freedom of information legislation, etc.).
‘By putting politicians, parties and elected governments permanently on their
toes’ Keane (2009, p. 689) argues ‘they complicate their lives, question their author-
ity and force them to change their agendas—and sometimes smother them in
disgrace’. What Keane seems to be pointing towards is the emergence not of the
‘death of democracy’ but the emergence of ‘hyper-democracy’. I want to argue
that the emergence of hyper-democracy is as much a problem as any of the other
challenges in this lecture.
5. Problem 5. Hyper-democracy (the deafening growth of ‘voice’)
Could it be that the problem with democracy might be that we have too much rather
than too little? Heretical I know but I did say I wanted to challenge a number of basic
assumptions and in the current context arguing that we have too much democracy
is certainly a brave (or foolish) position to adopt. Now before you start shouting,
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booing and throwing things, I mean could it be that we have too much of the ‘wrong
kind’ of democracy and too little of the ‘right kind’ of democracy? Now the concept
of democracy does not really need a new adjective—a current project led by
Jean-Paul Gagnon et al., (2015; see also Collier and Levitsky, 1997) has discovered
no fewer than 507 separate forms or species of democracy—but the notion of
hyper-democracy helps us drill down into broader issues of political disaffection.
Hyper-democracy, as political theorist Stephen Welch (2013, p. 2) defines it,
refers neither (to) ‘more democracy’ nor ‘an excess of democracy’ but ‘the intensi-
fication of democracy’. If (liberal) democracy refers to a system of rule wherein
authorities are responsive and accountable to public demand, then ‘hyper-
democracy’ refers to a system whereby the political pressures required to make
that system work—or as David Easton (1957, pp. 383–400) called them,
‘inputs’—intensify, putting the system itself under strain. It can therefore be
argued, drawing on Welch, that these hyper-democratic trends are not necessarily
‘good’ for democracy but can instead pose a distinctive challenge for democracy.
Challenge in the sense of a lack of proportionality in relation to both (1) the scrut iny
and control of elected politicians to the extent that it becomes self-defeating and
pathological, and (2) the relationship between ‘democratic voice’ and ‘democratic
listening’ (the topic of the next section).
The work of Hugh Heclo (1999) and William D. Gairdner (2007) provide critical
reference points for this discussion. Heclo (1999, p. 62) argues that ‘American pol-
itics has been transformed in recent decades. The political system has become sen-
sitive—indeed, hyper-sensitive—to prominent opinions and anxieties.’ With
echoes of Keane, Heclo argues that developments in relation to information com-
munication technology (ICT) such as the Internet, email and blogs (later joined by
social media) have facilitated new forms of mass mobilisation without the trad-
itional costs or time delays. ‘Publicity, exposure, investigation, revelation, and cam-
paigning for policies through the media have become the norm’, (p. 65) he argues.
Moreover, ‘information about politics and public affairs now flows continuously
into the public forum. All news, all the time’ (p. 65; italics in original). This argu-
ment, of course, is not original as a number of analysts of mediatisation have
made similar points (e.g. Mazzoleni and Schulz, 1999;Hjarvard, 2013). What is ori-
ginal about Heclo’s thesis is how the mediatisation phenomenon has intensified,
and that this has had a detrimental effect on democracy, as the political sphere
has become more volatile and its participants more unequal. The problem for
Heclo (p. 66) is that ‘the complexity of public problems usually gets lost in the dra-
matic factoids and disconnected commentaries’. Mediatisation has not, then, led to
an enlightened citizenry but one that is overloaded with information, lacks filters
but is committed to using more and more voice mechanisms with an ever higher
volume. Heclo’s second point is therefore not just about increasing mediatisation
but also about the creation of new forms of democratic control (Keane’s ‘monitory
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bodies’) and the removal of traditional limits on public control (e.g. the opening-up
of legal redress, the increase in freedom of information legislation, etc.) that had
‘opened the doors of the judicial process wider to organised advocacy groups’.
He goes on to note (p. 67), ‘in hyper-democracy, it seems, openness prevails at
every turn’, but ‘it creates in the American public a pervasive sense of contentious-
ness, mistrust and even outright viciousness’. These new channels of judicial
redress, rather than being open to all, have also been utilised for the sectional inter-
ests of political parties (‘sophisticated technologies for studying, manufacturing,
organising and manipulating public opinion’), the media (‘an inclination to
favour dramatic entertainment over substantive information’) and cartelised pres-
sure groups (‘activists abound, but in their crusading zeal they are very different to
average citizens’). Combining this argument concerning judicialisation w ith his ar-
gument about mediatisation, we can view hyper-democracy along Heclo’s (p. 68)
lines: ‘Policy debate occurs without deliberation. Public mobilisation occurs
without a public. And the public tends to distrust everything that is said.’
So one element of hyper-democracy relates to the rapid growth of mechanisms
that allow the public to hold politicians and public servants to account. Some of
these are internal mechanisms and others are external processes through which
interested members of the public can take advantage of new and increasingly
on-line pressure points. This is the ‘monitory democracy’ that Keane praises and
which concerns Heclo due to fears regarding disproportionality. But there is also
a distinctive market-based feature to the problem of hyper-democracy. The transi-
tion from democracy to hyper-democracy is flawed in the opinion of William
D. Gairdner (2003, pp. 80–81) because
Our modern hyper-democracy rests on a contrary assumption never
before seen in human history, namely, that sovereignty and democratic
right are no longer located in the people, in the whole community, but
have descended to autonomous individuals. Once this belief settles in,
the natural result is an avalanche of newly invented democratic rights
and claims advanced by individuals acting either alone or in pressure
groups held together by narrow self-interest. Most of these asserted
rights are aimed not a government the people wish to keep at bay, as in
the past, but rather against the traditions, institutions and moral author-
ity of their own civil society. In this scenario, the new imperium itself ends
up providing the ammunition and firing the guns at society through its
courts, tribunals and officials.
My argument, then, is that hyper-democracy involves the intensification of polit-
ical pressures on governments in a lib eral democratic society. However, those pol -
itical pressures are not in themselves fully ‘democratic’ in the ‘thick’ sense that
they claim to further the collective good and originate from throughout
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society. Rather, these pressures are ‘thin’ in the sense that they are generally
exerted by a small elite (as Heclo argues), and arise increasingly from individual-
istic claims, rather than those made for the ‘common good’ (as Gairdner argues).
This is why Iuse the term hyper-democracy as a pejorative term. Not only do I think
that it is possible for politicians to become hyper-sensitive to public opinion
(slavishly following the latest poll, focus group or twitter trend) and although a
fitting response would not be to cultivate insensitive politicians it is worth
noting that even democratic politics has limits. Indeed, as Steven Welch has
argued, one element of hyper-democracy is the constant democratisation of
democratic processes (the election of select committee chairs, the increased use
of referend a, etc.) creating an ‘ infinite regress’ of co ntestation that ma kes decision
making on concrete policy matters increasingly difficult. For Welch the problem
of hyper-democracy is ‘not a crisis of governability, but a crisis of decidability.
[Hyper-democracy] describes a problem not of imposing decisions on an
unruly populace, but of arriving at a decision in the first place’. This problem is
well known in relation to climate change, for example, where a key issue is the
need to institute long-term carbon-reduction strategies in the face of corporate
pressure and electoral incentives that make the very agreement of a consistent
long-term strategy difficult to achieve. Thus, hyper-democracy is normatively
problematic from a progressive perspective. It is problematic not because there
is ‘too much’ democracy but because the political processes flowing within our
current (liberal) democracies have been sped up by an individualised account-
ability culture, to the extent that the institution of long-term progressive
reforms on p overty and the environm ent (to name but a couple ) becomes increas-
ingly difficult.
Two concluding little thoughts in relation to the problem of hyper-democracy
deserve brief mention. The first is that John Keane is correct that democracy does
seem to be flourishing when viewed from the growth of scrutiny-institutions and
legal requirements in terms of transparency and information. We know more
about the background, families, behaviour and personal habits of our politicians
than ever before. But this does not seem to have created a generation of contented
democrats (quite the opposite). Could it be that we have too much of the wrong
kind of democracy? The second and related point is that the innovations in demo-
cratic engagement—on-line and off-line—have all emphasised ‘voice mechanisms’.
Hyper-democracy is increasingly loud, brash and sectional. ‘What is to be done?’,
Heclo asks in conclusion to his critique of hyper-democracy. One logical response,
he argues (p. 69), rests on curbing ‘the excessive democratisation that has taken
place’ but he admits this would be ‘completely at odds with the whole spirit of
the times’. Instead he notes the need to ‘work at organising the talk of democracy
in ways that make it better’. But instead of focusing on talking maybe we all need
to get better at listening?
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6. Problem 6. Hearing loss (listening to democracy)
The whole of this section is taken from Andrew Dobson’s wonderful book Listening
For Democracy (2014) and I am more than happy to acknowledge this huge intel-
lectual debt. It’s a fantastic book. In time I want to challenge and develop many
of Dobson’s arguments and insights in more detail but it is sufficient for the pur-
poses of this lecture to simply offer you his thesis as a related problem (a counter-
point) to that of hyper-democracy that was just examined. The simple argument I
want to make is that hyper-democracy is internally one-sided in the sense that it
consistently focuses on increasing political ‘voice’ but not ‘listening’. ‘Although
much prized in daily conversation, good listening has been almost completely
ignored in political conversation, and particularly in the form we know as democ-
racy’. Dobson (2014, p. 2) argues that ‘speaking has garnered the lions share of
attention, both in terms of the skills to be developed and the ways in which we
should understand what improving it might entail’. Listening is not therefore just
a critical component of the private sphere but should also be seen as public
virtue. What’s interesting, however, is that the art of democratic listening has
been almost completely ignored in political science. There are some theorists
who have related everyday conversational practices to the functioning and form
of democracy but they are rare and their attention to the topic is fleeting.
Anthony Giddens (1994, pp. 118– 119), for example, writes that ‘there are re-
markable parallels between what a good relationship looks like, as developed in
the literature on marital and sexual therapy, and formal mechanisms of political
democracy’. Robert Goodin (2008, p. 110) makes a similar point from a different
angle when he notes how ‘deliberative democrats redouble the demands of sheer
good conversational manners .. . Listening attentively to one another is part and
parcel of what it is to deliberate together. Discursive engagement requires interlo-
cutors to pay attention to what one another is saying and to adjust their own posi-
tions and their own remarks accordingly’. And yet for most people—academics,
politicians and policy-makers included—political communication means ‘voice’,
whereas Dobson argues democratic conversation should be far more dialogic in
which speaking and listening are accorded equal weight. Could it therefore be
that the problem with democracy is that we have far too many arguments and far
too few conversations? I take the Hansard Society’s 2014 report—Tuned In or
Turned Off? Public Attitudes to Prime Minister’s Questions—as a clear answer to
this question.
This focus on hearing loss can be taken further and in ways that chime with this
lecture’s focus on the political imagination. The notion of ‘sensory democracy’, for
example, emphasises the role of seeing and hearing as the main senses through
which individuals receive messages from other people. With Murray Edelman’s
work on Constructing the Political Spectacle (1988), Jeffrey Green’s The Eyes of the
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People (2011) and Sandey Fitzgerald’s more recent Spectators in the Field of Politics
(2015) as a notable exceptions, there is very little writing or research on the role that
seeing and hearing plays in democratic relationships. Dobson’s argument is that a
listening democracy would be a better democracy but there is a systematic challenge
to the notion of democratic listening in an adversarial polity. In the UK, for
example, one of the risks of ‘good listening’ is that you might have to change
your mind; but the political culture is infantile and immature. Changing your
mind or compromising is defined as a weakness—flip-flop, zig-zag, ‘u-turn if
you want to’—to be avoided. More provocatively still, it could be argued that demo-
cratic listening demands a degree of reflective silence in which to process and con-
sider what you have heard. And yet volume of hyper-democracy is loud and brash,
it’s high-pitch and high-octane, it’s frequently shallow and inane but there is very
little silence. Take, for example, the issue of digital democracy and the lost
dreams of the digital democrats who thought the Internet would transform and
redefine democratic politics (e.g. Carswell, 2012). ‘The danger of the Internet is
that it threatens to overwhelm us with so much information—too much informa-
tion’ Beth Noveck (2000, p. 23) writes, ‘so as to give the appearance of democratis-
ing and enriching our political lives while actually drowning us in irrelevancies’.
What’s good in theory is not always good in practice and the Internet seems to
have been particularly successful in terms of creating increasingly extreme echo
chambers and digital natives but where does it cultivate listening to those views
that you might not agree with? That’s why one of the aims of the Crick Centre at
the University of Sheffield is to calm the storm that seems to perpetually swirl
around politics.
One of the core engagement themes of the Crick Centre is the notion of ‘talking
to multiple publics in multiple ways’—a phrase that comes from the work of
Michael Burawoy (2005) on public sociology—but this in itself poses fresh ques-
tions about how we ‘do’ politics. Bernard Crick (2000) focused a huge amount of
his work on the notion of ‘political literacy’ but I am increasingly aware of the ex-
istence of a vast range of political literacies that might explain the gap or disconnect
between how one specific community wants to talk against how other communities
expects them to listen. Maybe the Crick Centre’s strap-line needs to be changed to
‘talking and listening to multiple publics in multiple ways?’ This is a critical point.
Many different communities express themselves politically in ways that go beyond
‘talking’ and ‘listening’ and may take the form of writing or rituals, art or music,
through dance or drama but our capacity to engage with—to listen to—these
forms of political expression remain under-developed. Developing new forms of
democratic listening therefore demands some way of making sure that, as far as
possible, all the relevant communities have been heard.
And is democratic listening always a good thing? I’m not arguing that apathy and
disengagement is ever a good thing but there is also an issue of managing the
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public’s expectations. Too many governments around the world have regretted the
launch of yet another ‘Big Conversation’. But this in itself brings us back to a simple
issue about democratic politics: it cannot please everybody all of the time. ‘It cannot
make all sad hearts glad’, as Crick put it and there is a difference between ‘voice’ and
‘choice’ that means that being listened to does not mean you will always get what you
want. As Tony Blair once told me, ‘People kept telling me to listen to the public ...so
I did ... I asked them what they wanted and they all wanted a million different
things!’ At the end of the day democratic politics is about the taking of difficult deci-
sions on the basis of imperfect information and with limited resources. It’s as Gerry
Stoker put it in his award-winning Why Politics Matters (2006) about ‘the tough
process of squeezing collective decisions out of multiple and competing interests
and opinions’. This does not undermine the value or need to develop a greater
social capacity for democratic listening—quite the reverse—but it does focus atten-
tion on the manner in which increases in both ‘democratic voice’ and ‘democratic
listening’ demand a certain level of political maturit y or understanding. Could it be
that the real problem with democracy is a lack of understanding about how it works,
how to engage, why it sometimes fails and the values that underpin it?
7. Problem 7. Political literacy (aspiration, understanding
and confidence)
The final problem that I want to highlight tonight is therefore the incredibly low
levels of basic public knowledge about how politics works and what politicians
do. Survey after survey, in the UK and beyond, repeatedly reveals that a majority
of citizens are today lacking in even the most basic political information. The pro-
blems flowing from this fact are diverse and take us back to issues regarding the civic
culture, populism, individualism and hyper-democracy. Learning for democracy is
therefore a critical element of contemporary social life that has been lost due to
changes in the home, workplace and economy but also through a failure to appre-
ciate that democracy—like many elements of life—requires training and support.
As someone who left school with no qualifications—save for a general certificate of
secondary education in Cookery—I am well aware of the form and impact of
various forms of illiteracy. And yet when it comes to politics we seem surprised
when a failure to take ‘learning for democracy’ or ‘education for citizenship’ ser-
iously leads to high levels of disengagement and apathy.
Now with a focus on political literacy I am back into the clear terrain of
Sir Bernard Crick and it is important to understand that political literacy is not
simply about imparting knowledge about who does what and how different
‘Big “P”’ political institutions work. It is also about building confidence and per-
sonal aspiration. It is about building bridges between social groups and pushing
individuals out of their comfort zones and into new experiences with people that
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are ‘different’ or with challenges that require new skills. It is about questioning the
materialist logic that says success can be measured in pounds, dollars and euros and
it is about taking mental well-being seriously. (If you look at the research of the
World Health Organization I think you might agree with me that ‘market
madness’ really is making us mad.) It is about igniting imaginations and encour-
aging people to understand that they can do far more collectively than they
could ever achieve alone. Learning for democracy is about sowing the seeds of an
active and engaged citizenry that does possess a healthy skepticism but is not
defined by corrosive cynicism that things can never and will never change. They
can change and they will change. That is the beauty of democracy. This is all
radical talk but when it comes to democratic politics I think we need to think a
little differently and in a moment I’ll listen to your response but it takes us back
to where we started with the civic culture. ‘We aim at no less than a change in the
political culture of this country’—that was the aim of the Advisory Group on Citi-
zenship [the Crick Report] when it delivered its final report on 22 September 1988.
So let me make just a couple of points about the role of citizenship education and
why it matters.
First and foremost, there will of course be complaints about citizenship educa-
tion and the banal danger of social engineering, paternalism and brainwashing but
at the same time we have to acknowledge that the democratic political playing field
is not flat. The most powerful in society possess the skills and knowledge to influ-
ence the system while the most disadvantaged have almost no access to political
education. Political education has long been the preserve of elites from ancient
Greek academies through to the Grandes Ecoles in France and the dominance of
politics, philosophy and economics within the British political elite. A huge
range of private companies and lobbyists also run courses on effective political
engagement for bankers, bookmakers and anyone else with the money to pay.
What is still missing is a far broader social education on practical politics that
can help democracy flourish. There are, of course, significant examples of political
education—the Scandinavian Folk High School is a model that began in Denmark
in the middle of the nineteenth century as a residential place of learning and
inspired a world-wide network of self-governing residential institutions. In the
UK the folk high school model informed the establishment of a number of adult
education colleges, such as Northern College near Barnsley. More recently a
number of universities have embraced the notion of citizenship as part of a drive
to develop non-academics skills and interests on the part of undergraduates and
to underpin the notion of the ‘civic university’. The University of Sheffield has
been leading this agenda with its ‘Achieve More’ programme that is not only com-
pulsory but is tied to delivering both academic and non-academic outputs.
But the problem with these initiatives is that they are sectional in scope and often
benefit those in society that are already likely to be both politically informed and
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engaged. Whether we like it or no, education for citizenship has to focus on schools
as the main compulsory community catchment. You might respond by telling me
that citizenship has been part of the national curriculum in secondary schools since
2002 but I can’t help but think that it was never really implemented in the flourish-
ing and dynamic manner that Sir Bernard Crick and his colleagues were hoping for.
In February 2013 the Coalition Government announced that citizenship would
continue as a national curriculum foundation subject in secondary schools and
the opportunity to flow into a reformed GSCE in Citizenship Studies provides
an opportunity to underline its significance both intellectually and socially. And
yet the reforms also reveal subtle shifts that may undermine the collective value
of teaching citizenship. In many ways citizenship education risks becoming indivi-
dualised and commodified in an instrumental manner. The proposed shift, for
example, from 40 per cent to 100 per cent examination is a fundamental change
to the nature of the topic that fails to recognise the practical skills that are so import-
ant to the subject. Paradoxically then what we havebeen left with is a model of citi-
zenship education that is almost wholly bereft of any emphasis on active citizenship
or getting out of the classroom. Sir Bernard Crick would not have approved. We’ve
also failed to invest in countering the problems of democracy. There are no clear
policies that actively support and resource the teaching of citizenship in schools.
For some reason that assumption seems to be that citizenship is a peripheral
topic that can be taught by non-specialists. Citizenship is the only national curric-
ulum subject that is not eligible for teacher training bursaries and therefore the
most dynamic and committed candidates cannot afford to train. (‘Strangled at
birth’ is a phrase that comes to mind.)
In many ways this emphasis on political education for everyone takes us back to
many of the issues, problems and challenges we have discussed this evening. Citi-
zenship education provides an opportunity to cultivate listening skills, to challenge
‘market madness’, to engage with individuals from a range of backgrounds and
most of all to instil a belief in the capacity of both the individual and the community
to make a difference. Put slightly differently and more simply, citizenship education
provides a way of tackling ext remism and fundamentalism. The cohort effect and evi-
dence from patterns of behaviour suggests that young voters become regular voters
and that civic engagement becomes a self-sustaining habit. Education for citizen-
ship, not as indoctrination but simply ‘to help in the task of restoring confidence
in the virtues of politics as a great and civilising human activity’ (Crick, 1962,
p. 15). John Stuart Mill believed that engaging in politics was educative and
would in turn create and sustain a democratic momentum in the sense of a virtuous
cycle. And although the available data suggest that we’ve lost the momentum and
broken the virtuous cycle there is also evidence that suggests more positive insights.
Almost 30 years ago Giovanni Sartori (1987, p. 103) made a statement that could be
equally true today:
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The state of inattention, non-interest, sub-information, perceptive dis-
tortion and, finally, plain ignorance of the average citizen never ceases
to surprise the observer ...[it is] a sad picture indeed of the information
base—let alone all the rest—of a large majority of the citizenry ...
in many respects and instances the public has no opinion but, rather,
inarticulate feelings made up of moods and drifts of sentiment.
But now we have new tools of political analysis, drawn from cognate disciplines
such as behavioural economics that allow us to begin to shed light on the ‘inarticu-
late feelings’ that concerned Sartori. Colin Hay (2013) and his colleagues, for
example, developed an experiment that sought to apply the insights offered in
Daniel Kahneman’s (2013)Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow. They discovered that
‘When in fast thinking mode, citizens tend to judge contemporary politics in a
negative light. By contrast, in slow thinking mode their critiques become more
subtle—and a more rounded, even positive, appreciation of politics can be
glimpsed’. They went on to make a conclusion that chimes with the focus of this
article on hyper-democracy—everything is fast politics—a low-level dip-in
dip-out 60 second news generation. ‘The construction of modern politics and
the fast thinking diet it offers to citizens reinforces the sense that we have a political
system peopled by politicians and other stakeholders that know how to work a pol-
itics dominated by System 1 processes but are loathe to encourage citizens to view
politics more through System 2, slow thinking .... A better adjusted political
culture might require some greater opportunities for slow thinking by citizens’.
Citizenship education should provide exactly that safe democratic space for slow
thinking (and slow listening); a space in whi ch to cultivate the political imagination
and a space in which alternative approaches to the art of life can be explored. I think
I have been talking too fast and probably thinking too slowly, it is time for me to
listen. But before I finish let me engage in a little solution-focused political
science by throwing out a few ideas for dealing with the problems with democracy
I have highlighted in this article.
8. The problem with democracy and the political imagination
Politics may well be facing many challenges—from global warming to water scar-
city, from an ageing population to chronic obesity, from population growth to re-
source depletion—but by far the biggest problem with democracy is the growth of
apathy and disengagement. ‘A world-weary shrug will no longer do’, Peter Riddell
(2011, p. 140) argued in his In Defence of Politicians: ‘The challenges ... are not
only serious in themselves but they are cumulati vely worse than in the past. Crucial-
ly, the current low standing of politicians means that representative democracy does
not—and cannot—work as it should’. Without a civic culture that reflects an
engaged and active citizenry we will not be able to address the challenges that
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undoubtedly exist on the horizon. I don’t agree with Robert Dahl (1989, p. 227) that
‘As the number of citizens grows larger, the opportunities for them to participate
must necessarily decline’, but political engagement must be matched by political
understanding. Engagement without understanding the values, aims and pressures
of democratic politics—without realism—can only ever lead to disillusionment.
John Markoff (1999, p. 282) has written of the history of democracy being the
history of struggle because it deals with embedded social conflict and tension,
‘Democracy in short has never been a finished thing, but has been continually
renewed, redefined and reinvented, drawing on political struggles in many
places’. Alfio Mastropaolo (2012, p. 4) reminds us that ‘the life of this thing we
call democracy’ has always been about ‘humiliation’ and ‘defeat’ as much as it
has been about anything else. For Mastropaolo we need to remove democracy
‘from the altars and to treat it with a bit of realism, or at least to recognise it
as an intrinsically unfinished accomplishment’. Joris Gijsenbergh et al. (2012)
and her colleagues remind us that crises are a constitutive part of the ‘historical
journal of democracy’ and that every significant wave of democratisation in the
world has been accompanied by a riptide of crisis but these provide an opening
for subsequent renewal and resilience. Those members of the public who first
heard this article at the British Library were themselves engaged in the constant
project of democratisation, the readers of this article have now joined this far
larger project but my concern is whether we have the political imagination to
re-imagine democratic institutions and processes and through this breath new
life into politics.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Thomas Schillemans, Mark Bovens and all the staff and students
at the School of Governance, Utrecht University for their excellent hospitality and
intellectual nourishment.
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